The Immigrant (no 55)

by Allan Fish

(USA 1917 24m) DVD1/2

Liberty, O liberty!

d/w  Charles Chaplin  ph  William C.Foster, Rollie Totheroh  m  Carl Davis

Charles Chaplin (immigrant), Edna Purviance (girl), Albert Austin (diner), Henry Bergman (artist), Eric Campbell (head waiter),

When discussing Charles Chaplin’s series of short masterpieces made at the Mutual studio from 1916-1917, everyone has their favourites.  My own would have to be Easy Street, as it is the most perfect comedy of the bunch.  However, if asked to name the most important, most professionally and personally, there are no other candidates than this masterpiece from 1917.  The Immigrant is the first film in which Chaplin’s political standpoint can be glimpsed, the first film in which his abhorrence for authority figures surfaces and the film in which the seeds of what would later be called by the McCarthy and Hooverites Chaplin’s unAmericanism were first planted. 

            Of course Chaplin was being naïve to think that his status as the one true movie icon of the time gave him carte blanche, irrespective of the horrific war raging through his contemporaries on the battlefields of the Somme.  He perhaps believed he was beyond reproach, or that he could say and do what he wanted on screen.  Not that there’s anything blatant about Chaplin’s message, it’s all very symbolic, very subtle.  Into a simple tale of the coming together of Chaplin’s vagrant and a dying widow’s young daughter on the boat bringing immigrants to New York, Chaplin makes several quite obvious attacks on the status quo.  He always backed the underdog, coming as he did from such an underprivileged east end background, but what he was doing with The Immigrant was really attacking the US Immigration board.  It’s a big two fingers of a comedy aimed at the government that cannot have been lost on them.  When we first see Chaplin, it’s only his arse we see, leaning far over the edge of the ship to catch a fish.  Later on he hits an immigration official, treating them with disdain.  Yet he could also be more subtle, as when he first meets Purviance’s young heroine.  She’s obviously got no money and he wants to help her.  Unbeknownst to her, he places his last few dollars in her pocket, but then he thinks better of it, takes roughly half back for himself, then puts the other half back in her pocket.  Unfortunately, he’s been seen by an official, who accuses him of being a pickpocket.  It’s a perfect indictment of seeing only what you want to see as could be offered, told with pathos, for sure, but also with near satire. 

            Taking The Immigrant as purely a comedy, though, it’s still a masterpiece.  All the Chaplinesque characteristics are there, with enough fake moustaches, beards and eyebrows to fill a school nativity play.  There are whole sequences to savour, from a hiccoughing fit on deck to his swaying to and fro with the ship to the first magical sight of the Statue of Liberty (a moment later evoked by Kazan and Coppola), culminating in the final set-piece in a New York restaurant, where Austin’s drunken, top-hatted, spats-sporting guest is beaten up and thrown out for being ten cents short.  To watch Chaplin eat one bean at a time is enough to make anyone laugh, but he balances that with the forlorn figure of Purviance, whose widow mother has obviously passed on, without hope, friend or money in the new world.  Indeed, Purviance has never been more appealing, and certainly looks a lot slimmer than in her other Chaplin shorts, matching Chaplin smile for smile.  When he picks her up and carries her into the marriage bureau (for which read takes to bed) at the film’s end, we cheer.

            Nearly ninety years on, does Chaplin’s film still make you laugh?  In truth, only fitfully, it’s the cleverness and the underlying subtexts that ring truer.  On the one hand representing Victorian values of romance and honour, yet also acknowledging that sexual and other vices go hand in hand with poverty.  In other words, had Chaplin not fallen for Purviance, she’d have been condemned to prostitution to survive.  It’s that and other such unchristian injustices that Chaplin is railing against and, on that score alone, it was fully justified.  Whether it was wise is another matter.